Thursday, December 6, 2012

The Forgotten Batmen: "The Batman's Burden!" by O'Neil and Chua (Chan)

Greetings, Groove-ophiles! Here's a dyn-o-mite Batman short from Detective Comics #451 (June 1975) by Denny O'Neil and Forgotten Batman artist Ernie Chua (Chan). "The Batman's Burden" proved that Mr. O'Neil could come up with a pretty cool Batman adventure even if it wasn't drawn by the likes of Neal Adams or Michael Golden! Chan's style on Batman was very different from his barbarian heroes, but it worked (even if the last two pages look more like the handiwork of J.L. Garcia Lopez...) Check it out!

4 comments:

DC in the mid-'70s to early '80s was a bit 'xenophobic' with its super-hero titles, and only let Filipino artists like Alfredo Alcala or Romeo Tanghal work on these characters as INKERS, often over pencillers whose abilities were far less developed. A pity if you've seen Alcala's solo efforts on "Voltar"---if not, do a Google images search, and be prepared to be knocked out of your socks by its visual greatness.

Can you imagine if DC had let Nestor Redondo draw Superman? He had that classic 'Patrician hero' look down better than most American comics artists did---likewise his idealized female characters.

The art is good. The story is a little reliant on the female character being dense and Batman being too gung ho to spend even five seconds telling her he's not just bullying an old man for shits and giggles.

At the same time though I like that Bruce is acknowledging that this is the part of the job that's not pretty and that he's not proud of it. Which is such a far cry from Miller's psycho-ninja Batman totally getting off on hearing someone's bones crack.

This is a Batman that can be bothered to have some compassion and nobility to him and it doesn't tarnish his "being "badass" one bit.

..and yeah, Cumming Streeter might be one of the worst civilian names in all of comics.

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